Over the years, the increasing sophistication of consumers has been matched step by step by the advertising industry. A century ago, the advertising business was in its infancy and advertisements in newspapers and magazines had barely advanced from the unadorned classified listings of the prior century to simple line drawings that were meant to inform. At that time, advertisers were just beginning to harness illustration as a means of making a product attractive.
Despite the tremendous advances in advertising strategies and devices over the last century, advertising remains particularly vulnerable to various factors which affect its effectiveness. In particular, advertising material mailed or otherwise introduced into the home is seldom looked at and often thrown into the waste basket without the envelope even being opened.
Another method of distributing advertising to consumers is enclosing the advertising with products purchased by the consumer. Thus, a mail order package received from a nursery might have advertising brochures of garden tools included with it. A box of shoes might have an advertisement for a particular shoe polish enclosed with the product purchased. Such advertisements are also often ignored, being thrown out with the package.
In an attempt to overcome this problem, manufacturers have turned to coupons. However, given the increased competitiveness of modern industry, the escalation of costs in the service sector, and increased general levels of prosperity in society today, such coupons have lost much of their appeal. They have become expensive to process and are eating away at increasingly narrow profit margins. Coupons have become so commonplace and have so over saturated the market that the consumer fails to perceive any real value in the coupon. Quite simply, they are passive advertising media and fail to excite the consumer and have thus lost much of their effectiveness.